December 11, 2024
5 min read
A Quiet Bias Is Keeping Black Scientists from Winning Nobel Prizes
The way scientists recognize one another’s work overlooks the seminal contributions of Black scientists. The Nobel Committees need to recognize how this excludes Black scientists from awards
The Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony 2024 at Stockholm Concert Hall on December 10, 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Marie Maynard Daly should have received a Nobel Prize. She was the first Black woman in the country to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, and in the 1950s and 1960s she discovered the critical relationship between high cholesterol, high blood pressure and clogged arteries, and how this could cause heart attacks, strokes and other medical issues. This was a huge discovery in medicine, paving the way for the development of statins, which millions of Americans are still prescribed each year to reduce their risk of heart attack.
Such a discovery easily embodies Alfred Nobel’s legacy to award the Nobel Prizes to those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” And later research on cholesterol metabolism and regulation did earn several other scientists Nobels. So why didn’t Daly, who made the initial connections, win this prestigious award during her lifetime?
We think it’s because the Nobel Committees, whose selection process is notoriously secretive, place emphasis on the way scientists reference one another’s work as grounds for how important that work is. Typically, Nobel Prize–winning research is referenced more than 1,000 times before the scientists who conducted that research win. These references, known as citations, are a proxy for scientific importance but leave room for bias.
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